Related papers: Polymer induced depletion potentials in polymer-co…
We computed the phase-separation behavior and effective interactions of colloid-polymer mixtures in the "protein limit", where the polymer radius of gyration is much larger than the colloid radius. For ideal polymers, the critical colloidal…
We consider a model mixture of hard colloidal spheres and non-adsorbing polymer chains in a theta solvent. The polymer component is modelled as a polydisperse mixture of effective spheres, mutually noninteracting but excluded from the…
The depletion force and depletion potential between two in principle unequal "big" hard spheres embedded in a multicomponent mixture of "small" hard spheres are computed using the Rational Function Approximation method for the structural…
Macromolecular solubility in solvent mixtures often exhibit striking and paradoxical nature. For example, when two well miscible poor solvents for a given polymer are mixed together, the same polymer may swell within intermediate mixing…
As first explained by the classic Asakura-Oosawa (AO) model, effective attractive forces between colloidal particles induced by depletion of nonadsorbing polymers can drive demixing of colloid-polymer mixtures into colloid-rich and…
We map dilute or semi-dilute solutions of non-intersecting polymer chains onto a fluid of ``soft'' particles interacting via a concentration dependent effective pair potential, by inverting the pair distribution function of the centers of…
An extension of the Asakura-Oosawa-Vrij model of hard sphere colloids and non-adsorbing polymers, that takes polymer non-ideality into account through a repulsive stepfunction pair potential between polymers, is studied with grand canonical…
The behavior of mesoscopic particles dissolved in a dilute solution of long, flexible, and nonadsorbing polymer chains is studied by field-theoretic methods. For spherical and cylindrical particles the solvation free energy for immersing a…
We study the depletion interaction between spherical particles of radius R immersed in a dilute solution of rigid rods of length L. The computed interaction potential is, within numerical accuracy, exact for any value of L/R. In particular…
When non-adsorbing polymers are added to an isotropic suspension of rod-like colloids, the colloids effectively attract each other via depletion forces. We performed Monte Carlo simulations to study the phase diagram of such rod-polymer…
When two macromolecules come very near in a fluid, the surrounding molecules, having finite volume, are less likely to get in between. This leads to a pressure difference manifesting as an entropic attraction, called depletion force. Here…
Mixtures of ideal polymers with hard spheres whose diameters are smaller than the radius of gyration of the polymer, exhibit extensive immiscibility. The interfacial tension between demixed phases of these mixtures is estimated, as is the…
We report a numerical study of equilibrium phase-diagrams and interfacial properties of bulk and confined colloid-polymer mixtures using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. Colloidal particles are treated as hard spheres, while the…
The depletion theory of nanoparticles immersed in a semidilute polymer solution is reinterpreted in terms of depleted chains of polymer segments. Limitations and extensions of mean-field theory are discussed. An explicit expression for the…
Accurate interaction potentials between microscopic components such as colloidal particles or cells are crucial to understanding a range of processes, including colloidal crystallization, bacterial colony formation, and cancer metastasis.…
A versatile new approach for calculating the depletion potential in a hard sphere mixture is presented. This is valid for any number of components and for arbitrary densities. We describe two different routes to the depletion potential for…
The distance-resolved effective interaction between two star polymers in a good solvent is calculated by Molecular Dynamics computer simulations. The results are compared with a pair potential proposed recently by Likos et al. [Phys. Rev.…
Solutions of interacting linear polymers are mapped onto a system of ``soft'' spherical particles interacting via an effective pair potential. This coarse-graining reduces the individual monomer-level description to a problem involving only…
We study the structure and interfacial properties of model athermal mixtures of colloids and excluded volume polymers. The colloid particles are modeled as hard spheres whereas the polymer coils are modeled as chains formed from…
We study the phase behavior of mixtures of monodisperse colloidal spheres with a depletion agent which can have arbitrary shape and can possess a polydisperse size or shape distribution. In the low concentration limit, considered here, we…